V9 | The Flash “Trajectory” Review

The latest episode of The Flash, “Trajectory,” treads some well known waters with Barry attempting to get faster to match the speed of Zoom. In typical fashion, Barry is unable to do this, at first anyway. The speed drug, the dreaded V9, rears its ugly head in spectacular fashion in this episode.

Barry’s absolute obsession with getting fast enough to defeat Zoom was only exacerbated after Jay was suspiciously pulled through the breach. This has played out time and time again, but it hasn’t gotten any less funny seeing Barry try, and ultimately fail, at matching Zoom’s speed.

The crew, as they usually do, provide a nice segue of scenes where we get to see some ridiculous dancing from Cisco and Caitlin, and our first sighting of another speedster on the loose. Yet another person that is faster than Barry, but the reasoning is quite obvious. As smart as Caitlin is, her having help does make sense, although it was kind of haphazardly mentioned so suddenly. I don’t recall her asking for help from Eliza Harmon (co-worker from her Mercury Labs stint) or them working together on-screen or her mentioning it when she created V8 (and then V9) for Jay Garrick episodes ago. Alas, Eliza decided to take V9 and is now hooked.

Eliza Harmon is really the Anti-Flash, essentially. For everything good that The Flash stands for, she does the opposite. She steals, attempts to kill and just generally enjoys to cause mayhem wherever she goes. It was interesting that when she would crave V9, she almost became schizophrenic. Her change in temperament is not something we’ve seen in Jay, but that could be due to the fact that he was already too far gone at that point. The call back to the first failed canyon jump when Barry had to jump across a chasm to stop Trajectory (Eliza) was perfectly placed. For the first time in a while, they didn’t actually catch their villain of the week. Instead, her lighting began to turn blue, and she ran so fast that she disintegrated. Yes, her blue lighting was just like Zoom’s.

It was nice that many of our predictions were finally validated or rejected. Zoom’s identity has finally been revealed through Cisco continuously having vibes in the same place, right next to Jay’s Helmet. Yep, if you guessed that Jay was Zoom you’d be right, probably. We still aren’t sure if Jay pulled a body switch similar to the first Wells who was actually Eobard Thawne.

While the Barry-centric plotline was nice, I thoroughly enjoyed the story that evolved between Wells and Jesse. Wells made Jesse wear his disgustingly bulky metahuman detector, and when she was trying to take it off she found a recording of him saying he will kill anyone and do anything to keep her safe.

Not-surprisingly, Jesse is taken aback by the idea that he would go as far as risking another person, especially Barry, to save her. It’s a nice sobering look that her humanity is still intact even with everything that happened with her and Zoom. She does eventually move away and leaves a note saying that she is going to learn to live on her own in Opal City, home to many iterations of Starman. It is an interesting turn that she is indeed leaving Wells, especially since he spent most of the season trying to save her from Zoom.

As mentioned previously, Tracjetory’s lightning was turned blue just like Zoom’s. This leads them to conclude that Zoom is dying, similar to what was happening to Jay, and that he needs Barry’s Speed Force to survive. This is such a twist since Zoom always claimed that he only wanted to be the only speedster, when in fact he is simply doing this out of survival.

Editor's Rating

Overall–95%

The episode was another fantastic one, but I just know that there has to be more to Jay being Zoom. Whether it is actually Jay from Earth 2, Hunter Zolomon from Earth 1, or an Eobard Thawne type of situation is yet to be known. Even though we had a “villain” of the week again, she was quite interesting and her effects were exciting.

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